In the year 1598 Chapman had just published the first seven books of his Iliad, namely, the first, second, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh of Homer. The remaining books, followed by a complete Odyssey, were not published until 1611, two years after the first appearance of Troilus and Cressida. To render the comparatively unknown Homer into good English verse was an achievement worthy of the acknowledgments Chapman received. His translation is to this day, in spite of its faults, the best that England possesses. Keats himself has written a sonnet in praise of it.
How great a reputation Chapman enjoyed as a dramatist may be seen in the dedication of John Webster's tragedy The White Divel (1612), at the close of which he says: "Detraction is the sworn friend to ignorance. For mine owne part, I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other men's worthy labours, especially of that full and haightened stile of Maister Chapman. The labour'd and understanding workes of Maister Johnson: The no less worthy composures of the both worthy and excellent Maister Beamont and Maister Fletcher: and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Decker and Mr. Heywood." As will have been noticed, Chapman's name heads the list, while Shakespeare's comes at the bottom in conjunction with such insignificant men as Decker and Heywood!
Nevertheless (or possibly on that account) there is little doubt that Shakespeare found Chapman personally antipathetic. His style was unequalled for arrogance and pedantry; he was insufferably vain of his learning, and not a whit less conceited of the divine inspiration he, as poet, must necessarily possess. Even the most ardent of his modern admirers admits that his own poems are both grotesque and wearisome, and Shakespeare must certainly have suffered under the miserable conclusion Chapman added to Marlowe's beautiful Hero and Leander, a poem that Shakespeare himself so greatly admired. Take only the fragment of introductory prose which prefaces his translation of Homer, and try to wade through it. Short as it is, it is impossible. Read but the confused garrulity and impossible imagery of the dedication in 1598, and could a more shocking collection of mediæval philology be found outside the two pages he writes about Homer?
Swinburne, who loves him, says of his style: "Demosthenes, according to report, taught himself to speak with pebbles in his mouth; but it is presumable that he also learnt to dispense with their aid before he stood up against Eschines or Hyperides on any great occasion of public oratory. Our philosophic poet, on the other hand, before addressing such audience as he may find, is careful always to fill his mouth till the jaws are stretched well-nigh to bursting with the largest, roughest, and most angular of polygonal flintstones that can be hewn or dug out of the mine of language; and as fast as one voluminous sentence or unwieldy paragraph has emptied his mouth of the first batch of barbarisms, he is no less careful to refill it before proceeding to a fresh delivery."[2] The comparison is strikingly exact.
It is this incomprehensible style which made Chapman's readers so few in number, and caused his frequent complaints of being slighted and neglected. As Swinburne jestingly says of him:
"We understand a fury in his words,
But not his words."
Even in his fine translation of Homer, he is unable to forego his tendency to obscurity, and constrained and inflated expression. It is universally admitted that even a translation must take some colouring from its translator, and no man in England was less Hellenic than Chapman. Swinburne has rightly observed that his temperament was more Icelandic than Greek, that he handled the sacred vessels of Greek art with the substantial grasp of the barbarian, and when he would reproduce Homer he gave rather the stride of a giant than the step of a god.
In all probability it was the grief Shakespeare felt at seeing Chapman selected by Pembroke, added to the ill-humour caused by the elder poet's arrogance and clumsy pedantry, which goaded him into wanton opposition to the inevitable enthusiasm for the Homeric world and its heroes.
And so he gave his bitter mood full play.
He touches upon the Iliad's most beautiful and most powerful elements, Achilles' wrath, the friendship between Achilles and Patroclus, the question of Helen being delivered to the Greeks, the attempt to goad Achilles into renewing the conflict, Hector and Andromache's farewell, and Hector's death, but only to profane and ridicule all.